


Hope for No Tomorrow

by hikash0



Series: Six Weary Grackles, Seven Let Us Rest [1]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Body Dysmorphia, Body Horror, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Delusions, Depression, Disassociation, Fslur, Hallucinations, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, Multi, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, PTSD, Self-Harm, Suicidal Ideation, Suicidal Thoughts, and expect these boys to be anything but heavily closeted and terrified, anti-semitic language, auditory hallucinations, of their own feelings, two literal monsters and one brutalized victim, you can't have the only examples of gay men in the book be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-08
Updated: 2017-12-08
Packaged: 2019-02-12 02:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12949533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hikash0/pseuds/hikash0
Summary: Stan tries to take solace in the fact that he has the power to end it all. Not today, not tomorrow. But someday he will go, and it will be on his own terms, by his own hand.Bill can ride to beat the Devil, but Stan, oh Stan can die to cheat the Devil. Ha ha on you, you fucking clown.





	Hope for No Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

> Special shout out to Mac (queenjameskirk here on A03) for giving me the confidence and encouragement to put this out into the world and for being a constant inspiration through her writing and friendship. I'm your biggest fan, be the mads to my kojima bro.

_Derry is here, in hearth and home. Wherever may the spring bird roam. Inside the breast of robin red, in Derry never do dead boys stay dead._

 

A spider, caught and dried between the pages of a book. Like a joke, badly written and poorly executed.

 

Stanley Uris is not fine. Never was quite fine really, anyone with eyes and half a brain could have told you. Still, it didn’t seem to matter too much because before that summer he had his family, his tentative relationship with his God, and of course, his friends. He was managing, before the end of the summer of 1988.

 

Now he is not. Managing.

 

He still has all those good things but, now a piece inside of himself that he never gave much mind to has been carved out and filled with another, foreign...alien presence.

 

Since It happened Stan has a horrible certainty that he has been changed. Something plucked out, an essential something sucked through his face and out his eyes to leave room for...what exactly he is not sure, he only knows it can’t be benign. He feels the unreality of the world pressed close like a secret to his skin beneath his clothes. Only this secret steals the heat from his body and causes bubbles of inappropriate laughter to fight his throat as they ever try to get out.

 

A seed of It. Growing within him every day.

 

The idea that It left something behind in him, _inside him_. That It...contaminated him…

 

Stan’s skin crawls, almost literally writhes. Stan's sure it would if he didn't have the strength of rational wit to convince himself against it. There again, that laughter. Wild and hysterical. Stan knows if he lets it out he’ll unravel to pieces. That there is a savage disorder It has placed within him. That small _‘I hate you’_ ready to gout out through his pores and fly off all his madness like poisonous spores onto his friends. Doing It’s work for It. Tearing the seven of them apart because they left him dammit. They left him to _see_ It’s real form all alone.

 

Unlike the others he understands without having to try. Maybe even more than Bill, Stan has a kind of unfiltered clarity that allows him to _see._ Which is why he never wanted anything to do with the whole disgusting business in the first place. Why he’d wanted to leave the disappearances to the police and the adults in Derry who would never see It for what It was.

 

For Stan to look in the first place is, inevitably, for Stan to begin to understand. There is no going back from knowing for Stan, no reversal to his realization or epiphanies. If he understands It, It will understand him too. It will see all the way inside him, find that which is inherently twisted, and infect him. Make him eternally part of Derry.

 

Stanley wants to forget. To take off, wings wind-swept and wide in an arc in the sky far away from this watery little death town. But the six others are his cage, tethered around him, forming points like a star. At this Stan almost does let the laughter out. At the idea of this, fucking, six pointed star with him in the middle.

 

His mother calls him for breakfast and he slips out of his thoughts. He has dressed automatically, clothes laid out the night before, without thinking about it. He clicks his teeth when he realizes there is a missed button halfway down his shirt and he undoes it all the way, takes it off and re-folds it before starting over from scratch.

 

When he joins the others that morning (late) to see Beverly off on her bus to Portland, his first thought is, why.

 

Why is Beverly okay, whole while Stan is not. Then next he thinks, love and desire. She is, obviously, beloved by all. Of course they all love her. Terribly, gut-wrenchingly the way the wind loves the sea. So much that it sings the song of storms, that it seeks to be entangled with the water at every turn. If Stan is a bird trapped with dutifully, wistful, bonds of friendship and blood-oath string, Beverly is water and sunlight, the essential origin of all the love in the world. Beverly is life and they are hopeless to resist the call of such a thing.

 

She came out of the sewers whole because she wasn’t afraid of It when It trapped her in the deadlights. She isn’t afraid of It, not like the rest of them are. She’s afraid of her father, and she already beat Al Marsh. Already stood up to him, smashed his forehead in with the porcelain tank cover. What is a monster from the void of the multiverse when she already vanquished the monster in her home on earth.

 

Beverly is _January Embers_ , Ben got it so right. As long as she doesn’t forget that she’s already won everything there is to win, no man or monster will ever conquer her. Never take her power unless she gives it freely. How could they when she burns the very air around her. Reaching for Beverly is like reaching for a star, and when that star reaches back, when that star longs for you in return it is devastating red sunlight fracturing around your heart and warming you in infinite places all the way through to your cells.

 

Stan on the other hand feels overgrown in his body. Like, he imagines, a giant squashed down and forced to occupy the space of a container too small. Like a glass window taped over and then quietly broken, shards separated and silent, trapped up between clear webbing. Always this, always threatening to crack, to spill over. The weakest link out of all of them and they all know it. The sole nonbeliever. The thought makes him mad at himself. He hates being like this.

 

He’s always been weak somehow, ever since he was born. Thinner even if he’s tallish, sicker, particular to a point that it spills out from his brain and actually dictates the way he accomplishes things. Eats his food in this order, this many of each vegetable - _don’t you put an uneven number on my plate mom, don’t do it_ \- or Stan doesn’t manage to eat at all. Chapped hands, splitting knuckles from over-washing, hang nails trimmed to neatness and then to blood. Puts his clothes on bottom up, socks first, then underwear, pants, belt, shirt. Crisp shirt then tucked neatly into his pants, all the way around, or something feels terribly precarious all day.

 

His room is spotless for a boy of his age, his mother delights in it, his father surveys it with an appraising eye. But it’s another one of those particularities that has such a hold over Stan that if something is out of place, he can’t sleep, can’t do his homework, can’t barely go out to play and forget about it, unless it’s fixed. He loves the after of it being clean but he hates the almost possessed way that he cleans it, to the disregard of everything else.

 

He used to take pills for it, and they made it easier, he could convince himself that nothing bad would happen, that no one would be hurt if he didn’t fold and unfold and fold and refold the dishtowels. Then this summer he skipped a day (Neibolt). The numbers got thrown off and Stan became convinced they would stop working, or make him worse. That by disturbing the regimentation of his medication he had caused them to spoil somehow.

 

The small bottle of generic Fluoxetine his psychiatrist Aunt in New York prescribed him doesn’t quiet it anymore. Not the thrumming in his veins, the impending doom of the world that lurks and lurks and only abates, however temporarily, when he does his crazy little rituals.

 

There are other feelings now too. Urges that are much darker than having to have his encyclopedias alphabetized and colorized. It starts as just a small discomfort, a little pressure the same as ears adjusting to deep water. Only his ears don’t ever undergo the popping relief. Instead, for days, Stan feels like a copy of himself has been made and then dislodged off to one side, and that the borders of this shaken self are hanging over the edge of his person.

 

Worse are the little voices, the ones that take up the sliver of space inside of Stan that has been vacated by the shifting of himself.

 

 _They left you,_ they cry.

 

_They’re going to get over it and move on, you never will._

 

_You can stop it. You can get out, get off the ride._

 

It’s like another compulsion. It comes fast when he doesn’t want it to and won’t let go of his brain until he acknowledges it.

 

_You can stop it. You could die. You should die. Sure it’s the easy way out, but it’s clean. You survived this now at fourteen because as a child your mind can implicitly warp the boundaries of reality and accept It somewhat, even if it hurts to do so. Even if you were never as good at it as the others. Forget about having flexibility like that at 40. You’ll go insane. It will crawl all the way inside your skull and make a cozy home in the husk your mind has become._

 

Stan closes his eyes and wills the voices to shut up. Just fucking shut up.

 

_Nothing is right with the world and you’re going to go insane. Slowly, you just wait. Stan-o, Stanley boy. You just wait._

 

That's how it happens the first time. He’s looking at himself in the mirror, trying to arrange his curls so they hide the ugly ring of scabs around his face. They are slow-healing, still angry red and irritated even weeks later, oozing like they’re infected no matter how much prescription ointment he has Eddie bring him. After a terse moment of battling with himself over the very possibility of such a thing, Stan is forced to conclude that they aren’t healing. That they might never heal. That he might have this ‘crown’ of weeping teeth around his face all the way into adulthood and beyond.

 

The crazy thought that his face will still be seeping poison pus long after he’s buried makes Stan’s knees weak and he has to clutch at the sink for balance. It’ just...it’s too much.

 

That is NOT how the human body works, dammit. That is not the proper way an injury heals. An injury HEALS God dammit. They learned it in physical science. About white blood cells and skin tissue over-multiplying into cuts scabbing over, and scars hardening. It has to heal. HIS body isn’t allowed to break the natural laws. HIS body is rooted in reality. HIS body doesn’t belong to It. It doesn’t. Stan won’t let It have him. Oh God.

 

Something inside of him whispers. The cuts on his face whisper. If it weren’t _literally impossible_ he’d swear he feels the air of a nonexistent mouth by the puncture wound nearest to his ear.

 

“Unclean,”

 

He hears it. Actually hears it spoken. Stan’s reality shifts, tilts sideways on it's axis. His hand slips on the rim of the sink and his knees smack against hard tile as they give out. And as his brain strains to find the logic and reason between the widening cracks of his psyche, a sober clarity comes to him.

 

He is going to kill himself.

 

\---

 

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

 

There will be no escape to the offensive warping of the natural world unless Stan puts an end to his existence in that world. All the science, all the concrete math and physics of the weight of light in the whole fucking universe will never mend the schism that has been delved inside of Stan.

 

Pieces of himself will just keep getting pulled into that hole filled with hollow, dead, It-light. It got him, that Stan can never again deny. It marked him forever. Already a little bit glimmering through the cuts on his face, like a fucked up halo. It’s in Stan's eyes too, if he stares at his reflection too long in the mirror.

 

Yeah, he’s going to kill himself.

 

Somehow once Stan decides this, somehow it gets better. He’s able to pack everything away in a neat little box and stow that box in a hole in a very deep part of his brain. He gets up off the floor, brushes his knees, and continues grooming his curls into something orderly. He pins his new kippah, a red crocheted piece his mother made after Patrick Hockstetter so _kindly_ disposed of his old one,-‘ _Nice frisbee, flamer’_ -on his head and then brushes his teeth.

 

With his mind made up Stan can relax again. He has a plan, he has a definite route of escape. An out that follows strict delineated lines that Stan has set. He can manage to look at the unreality of Derry and the offence that his own body has become somewhat now. Not full on, but out of the corner of his eye, like a wink that says ‘I’ll beat you yet.’

 

He doesn’t have all the steps to his plan. That is something he will save for a later day. Another laughing-crisis day. He won’t research how to do it just yet. Not now, not this year, not even the next time he thinks too long about his unhealing cuts and feels himself sliding sideways to eclipse the borders of himself. Stan has lots of things he still wants to do, has lots of people he loves and does not want to leave. Not yet.

 

It’s insurance, a safety net. A crutch, a coping mechanism that keeps Stan’s mind from departing his body for good. Not yet, don’t laugh yet. Don’t scream yet. You have an out, you have a route away from all of this. Don’t worry, someday you can sleep and rest and go away from all this fear. Some day, just not today. There are still things to do today. Life to live and friends to love, birds to watch, dreams to dream and hope to have and hold.

 

He starts to envision his life like preparation for a long trip he’ll never come back from. If it's fucked up and morbid, Stan counters by rationalizing that it's no worse than waiting patiently to die of old age. This way Stan isn't just closing his eyes and stepping in front of the train that is death. He's picking a station, a time, and buying a ticket. First class on the abyssal express.

 

He's not mentally strong like the others but he's strong enough to go on his own terms. Bill can ride to beat the Devil, but Stan, oh Stan can die to cheat the Devil.

 

Ha ha on you, you fucking clown.

 

It's only a week later when-minus Beverly-they're all hanging out at the quarry together that Mike blows the first hole in Stan’s watertight plan.

 

It starts with a question, unintentionally, or maybe intentionally, Stan knows Mike is sharper than glass.

 

“What if death is worse?” He asks them. “What if death is more horrible than all this,”

 

He gestures around, broad hands with fingers splayed over the teal water. Little droplets flick off his skin and sparkle glass-like in the sun.

 

“Oh yeah, nothing more horrible than a summer swimming hole,” Richie says, pauses to take a bite of the sad ham and cheese sandwich he packed, thinks better of it, then grabs Eddie’s good arm and chomps off a big chunk of his PB&J.

 

Then mouth full, he crows,

 

“Except Eddie’s mom’s summer swimming hole!”

 

Eddies open-mouthed outrage at having his lunch stolen turns to a full out shriek of disgust and he whacks Richie hard in the stomach with his solid plaster cast.

 

“You're repulsive, you know that!”

 

“Oogh! Ouch! Repulsive! Woah, woah, repulsive! You been taking vocabulary lessons from Haystack or what?”

 

“Don’t look at me,” Ben holds up his hands in a placating gesture from where he sits a little to Stan’s right, but he is clearly just as pleased as the rest to watch Richie get his comeuppance.

 

Mike ignores Richie’s interruption and continues his thought.

 

“I’m just saying, sure existing has its ups and downs and all the prey animals have it rough, but maybe...there’s a reason things up here work so hard to live,”

 

Stan turns to him with a frown.

 

“Don't you Christians believe in heaven and all that afterlife stuff? Isn’t it just us Jews who’ve got nowhere to be when we die? Live this life well and all that,” He adds, tacking on a thin smile at the expression on Richie’s face. He always looks so dumbly awed whenever Stan fires off any kind of wit. He’d do it more often if he didn’t think Richie would take it as an invitation to inject even more of his asinine humor into the air.

 

Mike gives Stan a bit of a look, one that says he expected Stan to be on his side, of all people. Stan usually would be, he and Mike jive well together. He’s made trips to Mike’s parent’s farm without the others, the birds are plentiful there and it feels protected and clean in a way the rest of Derry is not. Maybe that’s just the awareness of Mike’s parents at work, something even Stan’s mother and father lack.

 

Stan likes being neat but he isn’t averse to work, so long as there’s a method to it. He helps Mike with his chores and it feels like putting the world in order. On the days Stan visits they usually finish early and then entertain each other in the yard. Cataloging birds, or Mike showing Stan his collection of souvenirs from all the Derry places he's explored, a story to go with each. Theirs is a bond of easy talking, companionable silences and an appreciation for research, for the facts of the natural world and for the facts of time.

 

There’s the other thing too, the Bowers thing. Stan isn’t completely sure but he thinks he’s the only one Mike has talked to about it. About him killing Henry. Killing another human.

 

“What if there's worse stuff than It on the other side,”

 

Worse things. A worse place. A whole other universe past the veil of reality, where the moon is square, and triangles have four, five, six sides. And where gravity is just a joke.

 

_Where you float Stanley. Where you aaaalllll float._

 

Stan doesn’t move. No, because moving gives dignity to the fear. If he ignores the voices they will go away. It’s fine. He has a plan. He won’t be going to that kind of death place. He won’t be going to any kind of death place. Hell is for Christians, not Jews, so hah.

 

“T-that's He-Hell you're talking about M-mikey, and n-n-none of us are going there. Not af-after w-w-what we did,” Bill says decisively, shivering in the water beneath them.

 

“And what did we do?”

 

They all pause, looking back and forth in uncertainty. There is A Forgetting between them that weighs heavy and ominous. Only a month and already they can no longer be a hundred percent sure of the details. If Beverly were here it'd be different, Stan is sure, but she left for Portland in September and hasn't made it back.

 

“The sewers,”

 

“Clown,”

 

“We killed it,”

 

“Probably,”

 

“Definitely,”

 

Silence drops over them and in that silence Stan is sure again, sure that It is not dead. That instead, It is waiting tucked away in the holes in his face, waiting to come out from inside of his contaminated wounds. That he is, that Stan is somehow keeping It alive from within. Destined to feed Its long slumber with his 27 year fear. He grabs at the skin on his thighs and carves his short crescent white nails deep to stop the sliding that has kick-started inside of him.

 

_Unclean._

 

“Guys come on!” Richie exclaims. “No shit it's from hell, it's a demon! The Bible says so. And like, angels fight demons and stuff so there's no way we're going to Hell,”

 

Then he stands on the edge of the outcropping of rock chest heaving and ribs showing his scrawny frame, and hollers “Yowza yowza yowza! Ten times eternity for the archangel Richie!” Before spreading his arms like wings and flapping off the edge of the rock, landing with a resounding splash that soaks the spot he occupied next to Eddie.

 

“Oh my god! Richie! I'm not supposed to get my cast wet, you asshole!”

 

Richie resurfaces and his scream at the icy water temperature turns into him laughing and laughing. Bill chuckles beside him, lips blue from the quarry water, auburn hair plastered to his forehead, sun sparkling in his eyes.

 

“What if I get a skin infection from the moisture? What if my arm rots and falls off? Oh my god, I can feel it, the water working in under the plaster!” Eddie’s shrill voice echoes around them.

 

The rest laugh with Richie but Stan looks out over the quarry and longs for Beverly. She would make it able to be all right, complete the purifying circle one more time. She could burn It out of him just by existing in Stan’s proximity.

 

It’s fine. Stan insists to himself. It’s fine. If It’s not dead, if It really is alive in him then that’s just one more problem Stan can solve by...

 

He jumps a little at the feel of a soft touch against his wrist. He looks up to meet Ben’s blue eyes and the concern there. The fingers on his wrist squeeze a little and Stan relaxes his own, slowly teasing nails out of the white grooves on his thighs. He averts his gaze from Ben, embarrassed but glad all the same that someone saw.

 

Ben had stayed with him longest after all, supporting Stan’s weight and refusing to let go of him when the rest all hauled ass after Bill. Goddamit, Bill. Stan swipes the thought of his friend away like he’s been doing every time it surfaces.

 

Ben understands Beverly too, more than Stanley or Bill. Not as much as Richie though. Ben’s isn't an understanding of the head, it is an understanding of the heart. Not curated, not embroidered tightly into the fabric of their fates, seven strong and bound up together with cosmic force. Ben’s love for Beverly is an earthly love. Stan understands that Ben loved Beverly first, before the events of the past summer began, and that he would go on loving her ever after as long as he had life to live.

 

Stan doesn’t swim that day because he doesn’t want to get water in his open cuts, he feels like a miserable spoil sport, but by the time they’re biking hard along the path through the woods, racing to make the 7pm picture of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ at the Aladdin Theatre, Stan is already putting what Mike said on the backburner.

 

It’s a great film, crazy good how they mix toons with the real stuff. Stan thinks about the little he knows of Hollywood and how Richie had stars in his eyes, wanting to BE there on the set. The way the six of them passed popcorn and Stan didn’t even care if their hands were clean, how he didn’t count, but just shoved popcorn in his mouth like the rest of them. He thinks of Mike's steady body heat on one side and Ben’s soft chuckles on the other, of Eddie snickering into Bill’s shoulder and how Beverly would have laughed herself silly at Jessica Rabbit’s impossible proportions, and Stan almost, almost feels all the way good again.

 

It’s when he’s back home brushing his teeth fastidiously before bed that Stan really thinks about what Mike said. It’s a mistake to do of course but his brain won’t leave it alone. The thought of there being an ‘other’ place, a deadlight place where the moon is made of pockmarked skin and people’s faces are slated rock that flakes away dust and space sand. Where the Christian’s Jesus floated from the grave after three days and all those who looked upon him wept the blood of sweet, sweet insanity.

 

What if death is worse?

 

It occurs to Stan then, that no one really stays dead in Derry, do they.

 

In Derry the dead rise up, they float to play and paw at the living. Stan has a sudden vision of It, using his body like an anglerfish uses its light, to lure his friends into dank water where It picks them off one by one.

 

It has no qualms about desecrating the dead.

 

Using Stan's image to hurt them, to foul up all their hearts and memories of him. Cruel and bloody birds for Mike, God forbid something like what the Leper was for Eddie...

 

It using Stan and luring away Bill so easily, so easily like he had run after Georgie.

 

Bill had told Stan about the basement, how he had almost been caught. How he went all the way down to the foul waterline and stood there, watching as Georgie’s little body turned to rot and screamed promises that Bill would float. And still, still he charged down into the sewers. Always chasing the ghost of his brother, fighting desperately to wrest the ghosts of his parents from the stupor of Georgie’s death. Bill. Brave, _stupid_ Bill Denbrough. Ever courting death, hoping to catch the ghost of love. Bill would chase after Stan, sure as the sun shines in the morning.

 

So, if Stan died It would win one of seven battles. A door closes, isn't that what they say?

 

Stan finishes brushing his teeth with the knowledge that he just blew a second unpatchable hole in his own escape plan. What now, what now? Let his face rot until it falls off, let his mind decay with each incomprehensible realization. Let the lack of logic act as a lack of oil and jam up all the gears in his brain? How nice. How horrid. What a grand plan he is left with now.

 

\---

 

It’s four in the afternoon and Stan walks his bike from school with Eddie to get some more disinfecting ointment. The Kaspbrak house is an oxymoron of clutter and care. So many medicines to supplement health of body, so much garbage food to prompt its degeneration. Heartburn pills next to a pantry full of chips and soda, HoHo’s and Nutter-Butter cookies. How Sonya Kaspbrak expects to keep her son safe from illness in this den of Advil and sugar, of dim dust and faint mould is beyond Stanley’s comprehension. Then again Stan has a vague sense that there is more sickness in this household than there ever could be outside of it, and not the sickness of the body either. He doesn’t comment on it because to do so would be to call to attention Stan’s own mental weaknesses.

 

Besides, Eddie is a little like Beverly. Impervious, chaotic and eternal. He lives with his greatest oppressor and despite the hold she has over him, Eddie has been thriving.  

 

They raid the cabinet and escape to Eddie’s room, which is cleaner than Richie’s but messier by far than Bill, or Ben, or Mike’s. Stan understands that Eddie isn’t like him, sure he’s a hypochondriac and a germaphobe but he can relax into clutter so long as it’s familiar. Eddie doesn’t organize, color-code, tap seven-nine-eleven times, light switch on-off-on-off-on...off before he leaves his room. His is a learned anxiety, a forced-upon illness. No less awful, but not inherent in his genes the way Stan’s compulsions are. Hope. That’s what Eddie’s got that Stan lacks. A future where he beats all this and comes out clean.

 

“They aren’t healing,”

 

“What?” Eddie asks, looking at him with some concern.

 

Stan touches his fingers to the side of his face and feels where the wet pus has trickled down his cheek. He drops his hand limply, hopelessly, at his side. He itches to wash them, to wash his whole body over and over again. Stan knows it won't do any good. He can’t get clean when he is the unclean thing.

 

“They aren’t healing,” He repeats, like a scratched vinyl skipping.

 

“Let me see,” Eddie presses, all business and practiced first aid care packed tightly in his small worried body.

 

He touches Stan’s chin slightly to angle it to the side and it’s only because Stan doesn’t think he could possibly get any more infected than he already is that he doesn’t ask that Eddie wear gloves.

 

“They look all right to me, Stan. Sure they’re a bit red but it’s all closed up. We can probably switch from antiseptic ointment to some kind of scar treatment, like rosehip oil,”

 

“Oh, okay,” Stan says faintly. Eddie doesn’t see it either then.

 

_Going insane, slowly going insane Stanley boy._

 

“Stan?”

 

Eddie is looking at him intently now. Intelligent dark brown eyes searching his face, brows drawn in sharp and perceptive worry. Stan forces the corners of his mouth to lift and the tense muscles around his eyes to soften. He ignores the trickle of more pus as he aims a smile at Eddie. It’s not real. Not real.

 

“That’s great Eddie, thanks,”

 

“Stan, are you-”

 

_Are you okay?_

 

Oh God Eddie don’t ask that. Stan hates lying.

 

“I’m just worried you know, sometimes you think a scar is okay but it opens up again. It happened with my cousin, she got this piercing in her ear. Way up, higher than normal and it’s been a year, it still bugs her and it’s been a year. I know probably, she’s just not taking care of it, not cleaning it properly, it shouldn’t take that long for something so small to close, but…”

 

Stan trails off, all too aware that he’s rushing his words. He doesn’t do that. He doesn’t talk fast like Eddie and Richie, not unless he’s trying to speed over a lie. Stan knows Eddie knows it too, so here he is, caught out already.

 

“I’m just worried,” He repeats, and that at least is a form of the truth.

 

“Stan, you can talk to me right? You know you can-”

 

“Eddie!”

 

Mrs. Kaspbrak interrupts them, voice piercing their little bubble of sanctuary.

 

“Time for dinner, Eddie!”

 

Eddie looks away distracted and irritated in the direction of his mother’s shrill over-loud voice. He turns back to Stan and takes one of his hands, almost urgently.

 

“Listen, stay. Stay for dinner and after we can-”

 

“I made hot dogs and Kraft Mac & Cheese!”

 

Eddie groans in frustration.

 

“You can have yours without the hot dogs,” He assures.

 

“I cut them up and mixed it together with ketchup, just how you like!”

 

Eddie thumps his face into Stan’s chest exactly once before pulling back. Stan shrugs his shoulders apologetically at the frustrated defeat in Eddie’s eyes.

 

“What can you do? Pork, it’s everywhere,”

 

\---

 

That night when he walks into the bathroom it’s not his reflection he sees in the mirror but the flute player’s. He grabs the soap dispenser, ready to smash it into the glass and instead only clutches it tightly, arm raised in mid-air.

 

Not real. Not. Real.

 

The logical part of his brain knows that there is nothing there and that his parents will not understand. They won’t accept that there is something in the mirror, in the house, something _inside_ Stan that he needs to shatter and scrape out of the frame of his body and life. They won’t help him like he needs. He doesn’t even know what it is that he needs, and maybe no one can help him, not really.

 

He holds himself back from acting out things that might give him some relief because they aren’t things an adult does. They are irrational, tantrum-childish-insane things. If he acts out it will mean that there really is something observably wrong with him.

 

Instead, Stan snatches his toothbrush and toothpaste and retreats from the bathroom to brush his teeth on his bed, spitting into the garbage near his desk. He watches the blue minty foam slide slowly down the plastic-lined wastebasket. Then he sheds the lining and replaces it with a fresh one. Then he brushes his teeth again and spits again and empties it again because it didn’t feel _right_ the first time. He thinks about how much of a waste it is while he takes the two wadded up balls of plastic to the bigger garbage in the hall, the one that’s covered and hidden away and emptied more times than a normal house empties their trash, all because of Stan.

 

He has to physically stop himself, hold his fingers tight to the doorknob of the trash closet not to open it again and check that yes, he did throw the two garbage liners away and that yes, those are the only things in there. It would be a waste to take the garbage to the street, a waste.

 

When he comes back She’s in the mirror on his dresser too. He stares at it too long and knows he’s already slipped to the side, outside of himself. Probably it happened at the quarry and the great movie they saw kept him from realizing for a few days. He stares too long at the flute player, he pretends she doesn’t look a bit more like him than the woman in the painting from his father’s office, that She doesn’t perfectly reflect his movements as he crosses the room with Her and the mirror in his periphery. Stan knows he should feel fear, feel anything honestly, but it’s hollow inside his chest.

 

He's covered it now, with thick blue sheets. He goes back and covers the bathroom mirror for good measure, in case he has to get up in the night.

 

That’s it, Stan guesses. He’s just going to live like this for the next 27 years, mirrors covered, hearing voices, slowly floating just outside of himself. He’ll come back to Derry, from wherever he moves to, face It with the others, beat It, kill It.

 

Then when the final battle is all over and they say their pleasant goodbyes, Stan will wait until the rest go ahead and forget him. Only then will Stan give himself permission to kill himself. He nods, happy with his amended plan. He’s not yellow, he won’t break a promise when he was the one who asked them all to keep it. Besides, It won’t really die until Stan does. Not with them entwined like this. Even if the afterlife is worse, Stan has to die for It to die. That’s why It caught him, singled him out. He’s It’s life insurance, or something.

 

He looks at the phone near his bed and thinks that he might call Mike. Mike could tell Stan some facts, some historic facts about mirrors or maybe what shipping company delivers toothpaste to Derry. Something factual and not crazy that will help to calm Stan’s nerves. He reaches for the phone at his bedside but when he picks it up his mother’s voice sounds on the receiver. She’s talking to her sister, his aunt from New York.

 

“-don’t know what it is but he’s different, quieter,”

 

“Has he been taking his meds? He’s not still doing that thing with the dishtowels is he?”

 

“No, no. It’s different, I can’t explain it. More subdued somehow?”

 

“Is he showering?”

 

“Well yes, but no more than once a day. I’ve been following all the guidelines you set, we don’t let him clean the house anymore either. We have a housekeeper do it,”

 

“Maybe you should send him to stay with me for a few months, I can go over things in person with him, gauge his progress, give him some more effective coping mechanisms,”

 

“I don’t know…I really don’t know about taking him out of school like that. I think that would only destabilize him more. He needs his friends here in Derry,”

 

“It’s counter-intuitive, but sometimes removing a patient from a familiar environment, if that environment is a known stressor, is the best thing you can do. Didn’t you tell me there have been kids disappearing in town? Isn’t that alone grounds for sending Stanley away?”

 

Stan pushes down on the receiver softly with one finger, so it doesn’t click as he replaces the phone. He feels numb. They’re talking about sending him away. To a new city, a new house where nothing is familiar. Talking about restricting his rituals even more. Stan knows they have his best interest at heart, that it’s for his benefit. He’s read up enough on his own condition to know that systematically denying his compulsions is the only way to get control over them.

 

Still it’s ironic, now that he has a viable escape from Derry, Stan is rooted to the spot with so much reluctance he physically feels it. He wants to forget, he doesn’t want to forget. He hates his friends, he loves his friends. He wants to kill himself, he really doesn’t. It goes on and on, a feedback loop of yes and no, and more terribly, I don’t know.

 

All the while Stan’s eyes are dry, no matter how much he wishes he could cry. Could let some of what’s inside of him out, could scream, could do something and take some action. He’s so sick of being helpless in his own body, of letting things happen to him against his will. His compulsions, his screwed up brain. Of letting It happen to him.

 

Instead he goes to sleep on top of his covers to help himself resist the urge to remake the bed as soon as he’s laid in it.

 

\---

 

His mother shakes him awake the next morning, demanding to know what happened. She has dark blue sheets in her hand and a pale pinched expression on her face.

 

“Why are the mirrors covered. Stanley. Stanley, why are the mirrors covered. Do you have something to tell me? Stanley, talk to me,”

 

Still groggy from sleep he settles for a believable lie. He says it’s for the missing kids, it’s almost the anniversary of Georgie’s death after all.

 

He sees her relax, but not by much. She drops the sheet on the floor and pulls him into a tight hug that he stiffens against.

 

“I don’t like our house feeling like a funeral home, let’s say an extra prayer for those children and Georgie today instead?”

 

“Okay mom,”

 

She smoothes his hair out of his face and Stanley twitches under her hands, at the way they rub against the wounds and come away dirty with clots of blood and the clear fluid of leaking plasma. Horrors she doesn’t see.

 

“Do you want to invite Bill for dinner? He can stay the night, if you think it would help?”

 

Bill. Bill leaving him, chasing death. Bill so ready to die for them, for all the kids in Derry that he doesn’t even know. So resigned to trade himself for a chance that they might all forget and _‘live to grow and thrive and leeeeeaaad haaaaapy liiiives’_

 

“Until old age takes you back to the weeds,” Stan breathes, barely moving his lips.

 

“What?” His mother frowns, eyes sharpening. Eyes that usually saw so much, blind here and now to the truth of her son. He thinks he might hate her, just a little. Both his parents, for ever moving to Derry, for ever letting Stan be born. The way he hates the other six for making him go down to the sewers, and every adult who left the killing of demon clowns to thirteen year old kids, for fucks sake.

 

Then of course Stan doesn’t hate her, she’s his mother. He loves her as fiercely as he loves the other six. As he knows, more than any of them that only the seven of them ever could have won.

 

“I said, that’s okay. Bill will probably want to be with his mom and dad,”

 

It’s a lie, it’s a lie. Bill is...Bill is alone right now. Bill is cold in his big bed with all things except his notebook and pens, gathering dust. A big home of dust and stillness and parents that might as well be dead for all that they are moved to heal the sadness inside of their son. Stan should be calling him. Stan should be crawling in his window, or inviting Bill over for Shabbat again like he used to do before. Before Stan’s face became infested, before he was abandoned to the deadlights and forced to plot a point of death on the chart that is his future.

 

“I guess you’re right,”

 

She looks at him again, a fondness in her eyes that makes Stan want to hug her. When she leans in and kisses his forehead he thinks he might finally break down and scream about all the wrongness in the world, but when she leans back and he sees blood smeared around her mouth like the outside-the-lines scribblings of a child with red grease paint, all of him goes cold and numb and hopeless.

 

“Still, ask him won’t you? He’s a sweet boy, I think you two are very good for each other,”

 

She pats his curly hair and leaves his room.

 

Stan’s brain catches on her words and plays them over in his head. _Good for each other._ What does that mean. _Good for each other._

 

Does it even mean anything with the way the red ring around her mouth looks so fucking clown like. Is this even his mother. _Good for each other, very good for each other._ What is this panic, this sick lurching feeling in his heart and Stan’s gut. He’s about to have a realization. He’s slotting together another piece of the puzzle. His mind is laughing at him while it makes more connections that Stan doesn’t want.

 

Is that why Stan feels so hurt when he looks at Bill? When he thinks of Bill sparing Stan’s prone and injured self barely a minute before ducking into tunnels after illusions of dead brothers? Is that why Stan is fixating so fiercely on his love for Beverly? Because she is like him in her feelings, because like her he also…No. No that would mean that Stan is...No. Reject it. No. Shut it down. Unnatural. Unconventional. Unclean.

 

“Flamer,”

 

It’s his mother’s voice, it’s Patrick Hockstetter’s voice right up against Stan’s ear, disgusting and crooning and _knowing_. It’s the voice of all the children he saw floating above them. They crane their dead necks back and look at him with milky white eyes that seem to fizzle with deadlights.

 

“Flamer, faggot, dirty jewfag,”

 

The fear hits him now. Drops him to the floor. All the delay of feeling his body didn’t allow to reach him carries over from yesterday, from the quarry and the mirror in his bathroom and the fact that his wounds won’t _fucking_ _heal_. The certainty that he is a part of It and It is a part of him and his bones will be buried in Derry and he’ll never rest, never die, not even if he kills himself because It won’t let him kill himself. It will keep him alive forever and ever and use him to destroy his friends. Especially Bill, _particularly_ Bill, whom It had tried to take for Its own.

 

Stan shakes apart on the floor of his bedroom, gasping and dry heaving nothing but spit.

 

\---

 

That evening Stan takes a shower at Richie’s house. His mother caught him in the morning after he spent an hour with the door locked and the hot water turning to cold, which means he can’t sneak a second one at home today. One of his aunt’s ‘boundary rules’, no unnecessary or obsessive washing up, no self-destructive grooming. It includes washing his hands, though that is harder for his parents to regulate.

 

Richie’s house is an eclectic combination of antique furniture, curbside flea market pieces, pawn shop treasures, little snatches of New England, and occasionally other parts of America. His parents are collectors of Stuff, road signs blown into ditches by a storm, vintage advertisements framed and hung on every available wall space, only interrupted by the family photographs, of which there are plenty. Camping trip here, roller derby outing there, soap box rally featuring Maggie Tozier looking wild and enthusiastically ready to push her son down a huge hill in a questionably assembled vehicle. Richie looking all kinds of ridiculous, undersized in said vehicle and utterly bug eyed behind those glasses, God those glasses. Stan smiles to himself. He likes the Tozier house, it’s pel-mel and cluttered with stuff but there is a method to the madness that Stan has become accustomed to over the years.

 

It’s a house that would drive you crazy the first time, running into shit and stubbing your toe, nothing matching, everything bright and clashing with loud enthusiasm, every item interesting in its own right, vying for attention. By the third time you’re so fascinated you can’t help but drink it in, and when you leave you can’t help but think of what all those pieces, those no-filter snippets come together to mean. What is the house trying to say, under all that chaos? Listen, it’s important and beautiful.

 

_Unlike you._

 

Stan closes his fingers in tight fists and watches the scabs on his chapped knuckles split apart. It itches, in a satisfying way. Shut up, shut up! Stan thinks. A little too sharp for it to feel any kind of good. Rather, Stan feels like he’s losing his grip, sliding out of control.

 

“Hey ho! Stan-o! No spazzing allowed in this here household! You knows the rules! Here in the Tozier house it’s fun times at all times!”

 

Stan tears his eyes away from his hands and to Richie who strides through the door to his room, arms laden with snacks. Mostly chips, some hot wheels salami stix, everything salty you can buy for a few bucks at Center Street Drug.

 

“Rich,” Stan sighs fondly, carefully banishing all of his tension in the face of his friend. “I can’t stay, I have to be home for dinner,”

 

Richie looks aghast and he drops his armful of treats in a succession of dull thuds on the carpet before dramatically spreading himself across the open doorway, arms splayed out at long awkward angles.

 

“Mais non, monsieur Urine! You must stay e’re and sample les amazing amuse-bouche zat I ave prepared for zees evening!”

 

“Don’t think you can slander my last name just because you say it in a French accent, Richie _Turd_ ier,”

 

Richie’s eyes widen and his mouth breaks into a wide grin. Stan The Man gets off a good one!

 

“Oui well, ere at Chateau Tozier we take ze o’spitality of our guests ver-ee ser-iously,”

 

Then in his normal voice, “Your hair is still wet dude, stay until it dries,”

 

“Oh, right,” Stan brings a hand up to pull at an errant curl. Wet hair is a dead giveaway. Richie is quite observant when he cares to be and Stan is grateful. He also has the grace not to ask why Stan needs to hide the fact of a second shower from his folks.

 

Richie pushes his glasses up on his nose with a smile and pics the snacks up off the floor. They settle sprawled out on Richie’s bed with comic books and Richie puts the radio on low so that a steady stream of rock and roll comes through the speakers.

 

Stan tries to force himself into relaxation by laser-focusing on his issue of X-men Unlimited, but it’s just his luck that half way through, Iceman makes an appearance and doesn't Bobby sound just close enough to Billy for Stan's thoughts to take a turn.

 

Billy, Bill.

 

_Good for each other, very good for each other._

 

His hands lock up on the comic. Fingers wanting to twist and tear, to throw the thing across the room. Of course he doesn’t, he would never deface a friend's things like that. God forbid a comic book.

 

Richie inevitably notices his tension. He puts down his comic and sighs big and obvious so he knows he has Stan’s attention.

 

“All right Sedanley, fess up. What’s eating you? You’ve been spazzy since you got here, which means you can’t work it out on your own,”

 

Stan closes the comic and smooths down the cover methodically, there’s a sticky spot near the ‘M’ in ‘Marvel’ and he works on rubbing it out as he decides what to say. He can’t talk about the cuts on his face not healing because Stan knows in reality that they _are_ healed. Eddie told him so, and touched them like there was nothing gross about them. It’s just Stan’s eyes that still see them bloody and weeping yellow ooze. He knows for a fact it’s a hallucination, an impossibly fucking real one, like Beverly’s blood. Only for some reason it is Stan’s to deal with alone.

 

Instead he focuses on that other more tangible fear. The one that has him already sweating, heartbeat pounding at the pulse point in his throat. Stan talks around it, the beating of his heart.

 

“It’s Bill,” Stan starts, mouth slow around the words.

 

“What about him, our Billy boy? Billaroo. Buh-buh-buh-Billionaire smile man!”

 

Richie bounces slightly on the bed, punctuating each stupid nickname.

 

“I can’t...get my mind off him,” It’s safe enough and true enough to hold Richie’s attention without arousing suspicion.

 

“Oh, like, you’re worried about him? Me too man!”

 

“No, well yes…But not like that, like I try not to think about him but I can’t get him off my mind? I’m mad at him still you know?”

 

Stan gestures to his face, it’s as close as he’ll get to talking about It with Richie. They’re similar in this, neither of them like to dwell on what happened. Stan is sure Richie is doing everything in his power to forget.

 

“I’m so mad at him, but at the same time I wanna be near him. I always want to see him. I feel like I’m going insane, I hate it,”

 

Stan shuts his mouth tight before he says something stupid.

 

Richie however, surprises Stan. He doesn’t crack a joke, he doesn’t make a jibe. Thank God he doesn’t make any kind of stupid ‘fagola’ comment, or Stan thinks he might walk to the canal and toss himself in right then and there. Instead Richie looks at Stan earnestly and _justifies_ his feelings.

 

“Stan I think...whatever you’re feeling isn’t so crazy, I mean it’s _Big Bill_ ,”

 

Richie fidgets with the comforter, brings his thumbnail to his mouth and tears at a hangnail there. He looks thoughtful, a little nervous. He glances at Stan, a considering thing out of the corner of his eye like he’s trying to get a read on Stan’s reaction to his words before continuing.

 

“There’s… _Argh_ it’s so hard to explain! He has this like, _way_ about him? You know what I’m talking about right?”

 

Richie waves frantically in the air, trying to get his point across.

 

“Hell, I’d never do half the stuff we did this summer if Bill weren’t the one asking,”

 

Richie holds up his palm, showing the scar there to Stan. Tentatively, slowly like he thinks Stan might bolt, Richie reaches for Stan’s wrist and gently tugs his hand up to the same level so that their wounds are both visible.

 

“I'd never break this promise, I'd fight It again even though it's literally the last thing I ever wanna do, that's how much we mean to each other. Bill is like this magnet, I think we’re all drawn to him in our own way,”

 

“Oh,” Stan says, a little stunned at Richie’s maturity.

 

Stan leaves Richie’s house lighter than he has in months, like a sunburst through the clouds on a cold day.

 

\---

 

Despite Richie’s uplifting schpiel, the next time Stan runs into Bill, Stan thinks he might puke from fear. Bill looks at Stan and does that thing, the mental beat he takes before speaking where his eyelids twitch just a little and he licks his chapped lips before taking a breath. It’s because Bill runs the words he wants to say over in his head before speaking, to try and get rid of the stutter.

 

Stan realizes he thinks that Bill is lovely. Not lovely pleasant or lovely like a kind person, though Bill is also those things. But lovely in an ‘I would die for you to smile carefree’ kind of way.

 

“Ruh-Richie’s parents got him a trampoline, a big one. We’re guh-gonna rake up all the leaves in the yard on it and do ‘P-Popcorn,’”

 

The invitation is unspoken. Of course Stan will join them.

 

The image of Richie flashes in Stan’s mind’s eye. Freckled and laughing, sweater riding up as he bounces and flips haphazard among reds and yellows. Add Bill to that, flop of auburn hair swishing in time to his jumps, grey eyes bright, a trickle of sweat down his brow. The appeal of being with his friends is so strong, pure elation and happiness pulling at Stan like a thread of clean white light.

 

But then Stan’s newfound self awareness slithers in, insidious and relentless and it sounds like Patrick Hockstetter because hadn’t Beverly told them? She told them what she saw him do, revealed to them that Patrick was also like ‘that’. Look what kind of sick person he ended up being. No wonder Stan’s cuts aren’t healing, no wonder It got to him so easily, he already had a foot in the door. Already was an inevitable component of Derry’s filthy infrastructure.

 

Because isn’t there another less innocent reason Stan wants to bound around on the trampoline with boys. Push each other, touch, each other. Tumble into a giggling pile of limbs and hair askew with leaves.

 

It’s like the deadlights, once Stan sees he can never again feign ignorance, can’t help but read his own impure motivation in every gesture, every look, every innocent brush of hand on arm, ankle knocking shin.

 

So Stan turns Bill down with some half-baked excuse and goes home, and stands under the shower head until scalding water runs cold. He keeps directly under the spray and makes it sting and ache and beat directly into the jagged slices on his face. He cries too because he wants It out of him.

 

It doesn’t matter if the others are drawn to Bill, drawn to each other. Stan is sure that their feelings are pure and clean. Fraternal. That their desire and love is solely focused on Beverly, the way it should be. The way Stan thought his was until very recently.

 

Stan’s not avoiding the others, he’s just busy. He has his homework and his Torah readings to study. His dad is expecting him to take a more active role now. He’s not averting his eyes in class, or bum rushing the door to get to next period before the others can intercept him.

 

It’s not that he doesn’t want to meet up with them at the Aladdin on a Tuesday cheap night, or grab burgers and shakes Saturday afternoon, it’s just that Stan’s so busy at Temple. He just doesn’t have _time._

 

Still they keep inviting him, day after day, until it turns into a week. They keep coming over to his house, knocking on his door every fucking day, except Shabbat, and now he has to contend with his parents asking him why he hasn’t been playing with his friends lately.

 

Ben brings him that year’s edition of ‘ _The Maine Bird Watcher's Guide’_ and a few nonfiction books related to dinosaurs because, Ben quotes  “They’re prehistoric birds,” Stan takes them awkwardly and cringes internally when his father invites Ben inside. They talk and Ben shows Stan some sketches of blueprints for a bird palace. He asks if there are any special features he should add in order to attract certain types over others. Stan doesn’t have the heart to admit he hasn’t touched his carefully annotated field guide or his father’s binoculars since they went down in the sewers together.

 

Mike calls him regularly but their conversations have a stilted quality that never used to be there. Stan turns down Mike’s request for help with chores and repayment in the form of a Hanlon family dinner.

 

Inevitably it’s Richie who notices the gaps quietly widening in Stan. It’s Richie who doesn’t let it go, Richie who pushes at Stan, jibes too close to the mark until one day he snaps and screams, pale faced and shaking, for them all to _leave him alone!_

 

“You’re not my friends!”

 

Eddie recoils, Mike looks like he’s about to cry. Stan doesn’t care. They can’t _see_ the way he can. They’re all allowed to get better, to find comfort in each other and not worry about being an instrument of It’s evil. They don’t see his cuts, they don’t see It inside him. They made him go into Neibolt and now they won’t even take responsibility for what happened.

 

 _Bill_ won’t take responsibility.

 

Stan stares at Bill whose eyes have gone wide like a deer in the headlights, as if this is coming out of nowhere. As if Stan hasn’t been sending out red flags for a month, like Bill really has no idea the kind of shit that’s been spinning in Stan’s head since he stared into those fucking lights and his face got rearranged. Bill is wearing that look he gets when he is actually afraid. Is Stan expected to feel sorry for him? Not fucking likely! That high ugly laugh scratches at Stan’s throat, but his voice comes out choked and thick.

 

“I _hate_ you,”

 

“Stan! That’s too far!” Richie cuts in front of Bill, arm held out protectively. Bill’s face blanches, even his lips lose their color. There’s no buffer of a joke, no smile or sidelong look across their circle to say ‘I’m only kidding,’ Stan doesn't care. He wants to hurt Bill.

 

“I _hate_ you, it's _your_ fault,

 

Ben is looking between Stan and Bill nervously, like he’s expecting another fist-throwing confrontation. But Bill doesn’t look angry the way he did when Richie was running his mouth about Georgie. Bill’s not saying a single thing, his eyes are wide and glassy, his mouth is a strained thin line on his face. He looks wrecked.

 

“Stop coming around my house, don’t call me anymore. I don’t need friends like you, only horrible stuff ever happens to us when we listen to you!”

 

Stan turns away and he doesn’t look back to see if anyone follows him home.

 

\---

 

It takes a whole other week for Bill to call him. Stan hears murmuring from somewhere in the background on the other side of the line and knows that Bill isn’t alone.

 

“You nuh-need to co-come to M-Mike’s tonight,”

 

“Can’t. So sorry,” he fires off instantly.

 

He can hear Bill suck a breath and struggle to get the words out. His stutter is worse than normal.

 

“I-it’s i-imp-p-portant,”

 

“I don’t care, don’t call me again,”

 

“Bev’s b-back in t-t-town,”

 

Stan feels the pull of Bill’s words even through the landline. The weight of the threads of their fate pulling him apart six ways, making it so he can never fly away. But oh, how he strains against Bill’s thread. How that lurching panic makes itself so known in his chest and the nausea rises like the bodies of those pillars of floating children.

 

He hangs up.

 

He’s barely surprised when everyone but Mike and Beverly show up outside his door. Bill is in the back for once, letting Eddie and Richie lead the charge. Ben is set up between them and Bill, as if they all know who it is that Stan most wishes to avoid. Richie has taken the liberty of wheeling Stan’s bike out of his garage and setting it up, kickstand neatly extended.  

 

Richie and Stan stare at each other for a long time before Richie silently raises his arm and motions to his palm with the thick still-pink scar slashed there. Eddie, Ben and Bill all raise their hands in silent unison behind him, showing their promise mark. The air changes around them, becomes charged with power, and Stan knows he has no choice but to go with them. He gets on his bike silently and follows them all the way to Mike’s farm.

 

When he sees Beverly on the porch of the Hanlon home, bracketed close by Mike’s arms, it's like a corkscrew to the heart. He actually stops dead and Beverly has to come forward to him.

 

The others surround him, gently urging him forward, murmuring in soft voices things Stan can't quite decipher over the static buzz in his mind. He feels like a bad radio that can’t find the tune.

 

When she comes into view under the porch light and they are close enough that he can see the freckles beneath her eyes, he feels a tear trace slowly down his cheek. Beverly’s eyes are wet too and she opens her arms to him, they all open their arms and feel and see what they could not when their seven-link chain was incomplete.

 

“They won’t heal,” he says weakly.

 

“Oh Stan,”

 

“It took something out of me. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It took something out and put something else back, It took-” He tries to say but it comes out whispered.

 

They encircle him in the almost darkness. Nothing but the gentle sway of the Hanlon porch light and the crisp damp smell of fall. Stan can smell the promise of frost too, winter and ice and slowed down time in the darkness as the world sleeps.

 

“There’s something wrong with me, It put something _wrong_ in me, like Patrick-”

 

“There’s nothing wrong with you Stan, you’re nothing like him,”

 

Beverly embraces him and holds him to her and he breathes the fall in the fire of her hair and she whispers,

 

“I love Bill too, it’s okay,”

 

We all do. We all love so much.

 

She turns Stan around to face Bill, palm never leaving his shoulder. Bill who’s eyes are again a little wide, a little scared. He looks just as swept up in the silent thrumming magic of their reunion.

 

Bill comes to him and in the invisible glow of their seven way magic, their six pointed star with Stan in the center, he touches his forehead to Stan’s forehead and places his hands on either side of Stan's face, and he finally faces the consequences of his actions.

 

Bill’s hands run up and down along the sides of Stan’s face and he almost curls away from it, Stan doesn’t think he can bear to see Bill come away with dirty blood on his palms but Bill doesn’t let go, he holds Stan close and secure and looks directly at him, earnest and vulnerable.

 

“I’m s-sorry, for making you guh-go into Neibolt,”

 

Stan blinks because his face has started to tingle and his eyes have started to prick.

 

“I’m s-sorry, for not making sure we st-stayed tuh-together,”

 

Richie’s hand finds Stan’s skin somewhere by his neck. Eddie’s follow. Each of them touch his face.

 

“I’m sorry f-for not _seeing_ ,”

 

Beverly is pressed close against Stan’s back, he can feel her forehead at the base of his skull and her steady breath on his neck. Mike’s arms curl around the both of them and become a secure anchor around Stan’s midsection.

 

Ben joins them, slotting in beside Mike and also touching Stan skin to skin. They join their voices to Bill’s and the chorus resonates all around him.

 

“We’re here for you Stan, thank you for being our friend. We love you, we love you Stan,”

 

His face burns and Stan surges forward into Bill, catching him in a closed mouth kiss that lasts barely a moment before Stan is repeating;

 

“I don’t hate you, I don’t hate you, I’m sorry,” over and over against Bill’s chapped lips.

 

When they part Stan is crying freely, they all are. He touches a hand to his face and feels for the ridges of the cuts. All that’s left are the smooth and slightly raised lines of healed over scars, and the pure true love Stan has for his friends.

 

He’s going to be okay.

 

 

 

 

 

\---

 

 

 

 

 

27 years later Stan answers the phone. He remembers all at once, his scars reopen and It comes crawling down his cheeks. A faucet of sounds, gibbers and clicking chirruping things. Voices of old horrors.

 

If, perhaps Stan had gone away to college with Bill like they planned, or Stayed with Mike to take care of the farm and keep the light. If Stan had not forgotten that he was healed and freed that day by the love of his friends, if he was not alone, things could have turned out different.

 

Instead Stan shuffles up the stairs, carried by the static of hundreds of memories, past his wife who does not _see_ or _hear_ the way Stan does. He has no tethers, no six pointed star cage to keep him contained to earth, and so he floats in his mind.

 

He greets the woman in the mirror in a daze, Her arm mimics his loose and vague wave. God her face is so fucked up. His body plays out motions without Stan fully realizing it, he has slid so far beside himself that he is in fact, watching himself.

 

As Stan runs his bath he thinks;

 

A door closes. Isn’t that what they say?


End file.
